Thomas Percival’s Medical Ethics and the Invention of Medical Professionalism

Laurence B. McCullough has been a philosopher-medical educator for four decades.  He has taught and published in ethics of aging, medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, paediatrics, psychiatry, and surgery.  From the beginning of his academic career he has been an historian of medical ethics.  His books on the history of medical ethics include John Gregory and the Invention of Professional Medical Ethics and the Profession of Medicine (Kluwer 1998), John Gregory's Writings on Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine (as editor, Kluwer 1998), and The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics (as co-editor with Robert B. Baker, Cambridge University Press, 2009).

 After receiving his AB in Art History from Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, he completed his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.  After a post-doctoral fellowship at The Hastings Center (then in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York) he joined the medical and philosophy faculties at Texas A&M University.  He then served on the medical faculty at Georgetown University and as a Senior Research

Preface.- Acknowledgements.- Part I: Thomas Percival's Medical Ethics and the Invention of.- Medical Professionalism.- Chapter 1: What Percival Inherits: John Gregory's Moral Revolution against the Long Tradition of Entrepreneurial Medicine in the History of Western Medicine.- Chapter 2.- An Intellectual Biography of Thomas Percival.- Chapter 3: Thomas Percival Joins Gregory's Moral Revolution against the Long Tradition of Entrepreneurial Medicine in the History of Western Medicine.- Chapter 4: The Place of Percival's Medical Ethics in the History of Medical Ethics.- Bibliography.- Part II:       Three Key Percival Texts - Medical Ethics, Medical Jurisprudence, and Extracts - Two Concordances, and a Chronology.- Three Texts.- Concordance of Medical Jurisprudence with Medical Ethics.- Concordance of Medical Ethics with the Extracts.- Chronology of Thomas Percival's Life and Works.- Index.